Dogs Are The Key To Saving People With Cancer

Stories about dogs that have the ability to save people with cancer, whether their owners or people they meet on the street, are increasingly frequent. In this article, we’ll tell you why dogs can be the key to detecting disease and how to pay attention to the signals they give us.

Ted, the dog that “smelled” his owner’s cancer

We know that pets give their lives for us. We know of cases of dogs saving children in fires or floods. Or who rescued abandoned babies or who attack a delinquent to prevent theft. But it still seems strange to us that a dog has the ability to warn its owner that he is suffering from some disease.

You will love this beautiful story. You will understand why dogs are man’s best friend. Ted is a border collie who has lived in Stockton (England) since 46-year-old Josie Conlan adopted him. The dog had been suffering abuse since puppy, so its personality is much more withdrawn and shy.

Josie was used to the appearance of small lumps on her breast, because they were habitual and harmless. But one day, Ted’s attitude changed: he kept sniffing the woman’s breast and moaning and screaming. As the dog continued with this attitude, Josie decided to see a doctor. Tests indicated that she suffered from breast cancer. The good news is that because it was detected in time, doctors were able to act quickly and extract the tumor.

According to the woman, “Ted is the best gift that life could give to his family (she is married and has two daughters). Ted thanks us daily for rescuing him from the situation of abuse, so he saved me from suffering from this disease.”

More cases of cancer “snorter” dogs

Ted isn’t the only furry one who has detected something in his owners’ bodies. In 1989, a lady arrived at King’s College Hospital in London asking them to examine a lump she had on her leg that her dog insisted on sniffing and barking. It was an early stage malignant melanoma that could be removed without further complications.

Claire Guest was 45 years old when her dog, a Fox red labrador, discovered she had breast cancer. He kept staring and then balanced on her chest. This led her to take an exam and discover a small lump.

As these cases are decisive, a group of doctors (people and animals) decided to train two dogs so that they would sniff people and indicate if they had cancer. “Charlie” (a German shepherd) and “Alfie” (a labradoodle), were the two Californian dogs trained to recognize this disease through smell.

cancer detecting dogs

It’s good to know that dogs have more than 220 million olfactory receptors in their nose (people only 5 million). Therefore, they can detect smells up to 100,000 times more than us. Alfie and Charlie have been trained to detect two types of cancer: ovarian and breast cancer. The noses of both are in charge of sniffing out a specific molecular compound of this disease. Although these have not been differentiated by scientists, animals recognize it without problems.

In England, there is another group of scientists and doctors who are training a dog. They are training you to have the ability to detect the volatile or organic chemical compounds found in people with this condition. In the case of prostate cancer, the animal must smell the patient’s urine. In the intestine, it should be done with stool samples and, in the lung, through the air that the person exhales.

According to the British Medical Journal, the Labrador dog that participated in the experiment had 95% accuracy in air samples and 98% in urine and feces. All patients who had cancer were in the early stage of the disease.

Main image source: www.abc.es